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Book Review: 'Not I' by Joachim Fest

"Keep your head down," Johannes Fest told his family, "but don't let it make you smaller."

By

T.J. Reed

Feb. 21, 2014 5:02 p.m. ET

The socially conformist thing to do for a man of distinction—journalist, filmmaker, author of the best-selling first postwar German biography of Hitler, eventually co-editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung—would have been to recount the history of his own distinguished career. Instead Joachim Fest (1926-2006) chose to write "Not I," a colorful and dramatic account of his childhood and youth in the nonconformist family that made him what he became.